Faces from the Ice Age

Photoshop B.C. Edition writes: "Talk about data mining. Apparently some of those ice age cave paintings found throughout France actually may have, or had, some human portraits engraved, not on their walls, but on their floors. The controversial discovery was made at the Lascaux cave complex whose paintings date back around 15,000 years ago. This may explain why all the previous examples of cave paintings never depicted realistic representations of humans, while at the same time successfully representing realistic looking animals. (By the way, the one at the bottom of the article looks like Darth Maul ;)"

Comments

Re:i believe this outdates previous records

[Ashurbanipal]

That early, people were not "people" as they are today.

Depending on how you meant that, it's either very obvious or it's a good example of the tendency to dehumanize other races and tribes. Would you care to elaborate?

It seems that capacity for symbolic representation began in the Upper Paleolithic

Unless the archeological record is incomplete. I think it's just as likely that earlier art did not survive - there has to be some upper limit to the shelf life of prehistoric art, so maybe that's the barrier we've found and it has nothing to do with hominid capacities at all.

I think you need a time machine to know for sure, but I'd like to hear the basis of your dating anyway!